The present invention concerns the loading of an application to be deployed, also referred to as an application to be distributed, in a terminal and a chip card, also referred to as a microcontroller card or integrated-circuit card.
The terminal accepts the chip card and can, according to a preferred example, be a mobile radiotelephone terminal for which the chip card is a removable user identity module SIM (Subscriber Identity Module), to which reference will be made later in the description. In other examples, the terminal can be a bank terminal accepting a debit or credit card, or a personal computer (PC) provided with a chip card reader, or small communicating equipment such as a personal digital assistant (PDA) able to read a chip card introduced into it.
The invention thus concerns in general terms an open terminal in which there is implemented an open operating system which allows dynamic downloading of additional applications “on top of” the operating system partially in a chip card accepted in the terminal.
Referring to FIG. 1, this depicts the main entities for downloading an application composed of a first part PA1 and a second part PA2 from an OTA (Over The Air) platform such as an application server SAP to a mobile radiotelephone TE containing a removable chip card CP of the SIM card type. The terminal TE and the chip card CP each contain an interpreter of the Java or Microsoft (registered trade marks) virtual machine type. In particular, the terminal includes a card manager G for managing the data exchanges between the world external to the terminal TE and the chip card CP.
The application server SAP is managed for example by an application provider for mobile terminals and operates in the following manner in order to download an application composed of the parts PA1 and PA2.
The first part PA1, intended to be loaded into the terminal TE, is downloaded through a network of packets of the Internet type RP, a switched telephone network RTC and the radiotelephone network RR to which the terminal TE belongs. The downloading of the first application part PA1 is carried out at a higher rate, typically 9600 bits/second, in particular through a traffic channel of the radiotelephone network RR. The part PA 1 is installed and managed by an application manager G implemented in the terminal.
The second application part PA2, intended for the chip card CP, can be downloaded only be means of short messages MC whose transmission rate is low, a few hundred of bits per second, and therefore very much less than the rate for downloading the first application part PA1. Thus the second application part PA2 passes through the packet network RP, a short message server SMC generally generating several short messages MC segmenting the application part PA2 transmitted directly or through an intermediate network RI of the ISDN or X.25 type to the radiotelephone network RR, and then through the terminal TE, which is transparent to the application part PA2.
The separation of the application into two parts PA1 and PA2 through the different transmission parts RP-RTC-RR and RP-SMC-RI-RR naturally gives rise to a desynchronisation of the application parts actually downloaded separately into the terminal TE and the chip card CP. Since the downloadings are performed separately, the terminal TE and the chip card CP acknowledge reception of the downloading of the parts PA1 and PA2 to the server SAP separately rather than simultaneously before commencing any execution of the application [PA1, PA2] in the terminal TE and chip card CP assembly. In particular, the application manager G must wait until the second application part PA2 is completely downloaded into the card CP at the said low rate in order to decide on execution of the application.